How To Become A 37 Year Old Broke Loser

Summary

In an open and candid video, RobertElderSoftware delves into the harsh realities of navigating a financial and personal crisis at the age of 37. Despite a prestigious education, he finds himself in a precarious financial situation, suggesting a counter-narrative to the typical success stories often highlighted online. The video explores his current living conditions, financial distress, and his legal battles against eviction, providing an honest insight into the trials of entrepreneurship in today's world.

Highlights

• The speaker opens up about his bank account balancing act amidst rent and dental bills. 💸
• Facing evacuation due to notorious landlord tactics highlights urban housing issues. 🚪
• His experiences in the tech world reveal stark truths about corporate and startup life. 📊
• Despite setbacks, he highlights YouTube as a burgeoning avenue for personal growth. 🌱
• A deep dive into legal entanglements reveals holes within tenant protections. 👨‍⚖️

Key Takeaways

• Life's path isn't always linear; even with a degree, financial struggles can happen. 🎢
• Entrepreneurship is challenging, often requiring thick skin and perseverance. 💼
• The video emphasizes the importance of transparency about failures as well as successes. 🗣️
• The process of legal eviction in Ontario reveals its own set of challenges and systemic issues. 🏠
• Pursuing alternative paths like YouTube can provide a different kind of fulfillment and potential financial recovery. 🎥

Overview

RobertElderSoftware takes viewers on a rollercoaster journey through his experiences as a seemingly 'failed' entrepreneur at 37. With candidness and humor, he unpacks the series of events leading to his current state, juxtaposing his financial woes against a backdrop of high educational achievements. His story serves as a sobering reminder of the unpredictability of life's path - that despite meticulous planning and hard work, circumstances can still spiral out of control.

In this raw narrative, the YouTuber discusses the heavy burden of financial instability, accentuated by his looming dental expenses and complicated eviction case. He shares insights into his past business ventures, revealing the less glamorous side of entrepreneurship that many motivational speakers gloss over. His insights into the tech industry provide a gritty contrast to the idealized dream of startups and self-employment, underscoring the challenges of finding sustainable income streams.

Despite all hardships, the video ends on a note of resilience and adaptability. Exploring his journey through legal battles and unconventional career reinventions, RobertElderSoftware expresses a nuanced understanding of stability in life and business. His commitment to growing his YouTube channel exemplifies a shift in focus, leveraging digital platforms for potential growth. His story is one of perseverance, illustrating that no matter how bleak a situation may seem, there is always an opportunity to chart a new course.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction The chapter titled 'Introduction' starts with the author expressing their intention to discuss a topic they've contemplated for some time, prompted by recent events. The chapter humorously contrasts commonly found content about achieving millionaire status by offering a personal guide on becoming a 'broke 37-year-old loser,' despite having an advanced technical degree from a prestigious university. The author aims to establish credibility through transparency about their financial and living situation, disclosing they currently have $650.
• 02:00 - 06:42: Financial Overview The chapter titled 'Financial Overview' provides a detailed account of the individual's personal and business financial standings. It lists the balances on various personal and business bank accounts and credit cards, highlighting a personal credit card debt of $1,580 and $830, a minimal business bank account balance of $120, and a business credit card debt of $3,100. The chapter also mentions new unexpected liabilities which prompted the creation of the video.
• 06:42 - 19:00: Living Situation and Eviction Issues In the chapter titled 'Living Situation and Eviction Issues', the narrator discusses a recent dental issue where a tooth fractured, requiring a root canal and crown. The cost is substantial, totaling over $3,000. Despite the financial burden, the narrator has concluded that it is cheaper to handle such expenses out-of-pocket rather than opting for dental insurance. The narrative presents these dental expenses as part of the broader financial challenges being faced, suggesting a situation of financial strain.
• 19:00 - 29:00: Career Path and Employment Challenges The chapter titled 'Career Path and Employment Challenges' delves into an individual's current financial assets, detailing various accounts such as a tax-free savings account with $250, an RSP account with $1,620, and an old Bank of America account holding $500 USD, translating to approximately $250 Canadian. It highlights the steps taken to manage immediate financial needs like dental work by liquidating these assets. The focus then shifts from balance sheet status to considerations surrounding cash flow management.
• 29:00 - 44:24: Business Ventures and Failures The chapter titled 'Business Ventures and Failures' discusses the financial situation and income sources of an individual. The individual has a monthly rent of $1,100 and spends $300 on food and personal expenses, and $200 on other services like internet and phone. Their primary source of income is YouTube, which generates an average revenue of $700 per month over the last six months. This results in a net monthly cash flow deficit of about $900. However, with another YouTube payment of $700 expected in a few days, the individual is navigating through a challenging financial situation.
• 44:24 - 53:00: Kickstarter and YouTube Ventures In the chapter titled 'Kickstarter and YouTube Ventures,' the speaker discusses their current financial situation, emphasizing the unsustainability of their current financial management. They mention that despite having enough to cover rent and delayed dental expenses, there is a lack of stable income and insufficient savings. These details raise questions about their financial planning over the past decade, which the speaker promises to address later in the video. Meanwhile, the chapter hints towards further discussions on their living arrangement, which is a part of the broader narrative around their financial and personal life decisions.
• 53:00 - 68:00: Personal Life and Social Challenges The speaker provides an update on their ongoing eviction situation by a landlord who is notorious in Ontario for buying older, rent-controlled buildings and issuing a high number of eviction notices. The speaker's eviction hearing is set for February 19th, 2025.
• 68:00 - 74:00: Reflecting on Choices and Giving Advice In this chapter, the focus is on the controversial practice of issuing N13 eviction notices, which allows landlords to legally evict tenants from rent-controlled properties to conduct extensive renovations. The narrative describes the typical claim of an 8 to 9-month renovation period, which is significantly exaggerated compared to an actual observed renovation that took less than 2 months. This chapter raises questions about the motives and ethical considerations of landlords in such situations.
• 74:00 - 73:00: Conclusion The chapter 'Conclusion' discusses conflicting statements regarding plumbing renovations in a building. One tenant mentions the bathroom plumbing was replaced 10 years ago without evictions. Other tenants dispute the necessity of replacing kitchen plumbing stacks, arguing that even if necessary, it shouldn't require vacating the premises. Concerns are raised about the landlord's reputation, particularly about the tenant's right to return after renovations, which is guaranteed by the N13 process.

How To Become A 37 Year Old Broke Loser Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so this is a video topic that I've been thinking about doing for a while now and something happened recently that made me think it's finally time to make this video there are lots of videos out there on how to become a millionaire but in this video I'll teach you how to become a broke 37-year-old loser despite having an advanced technical degree from a prestigious University now there are lots of people on the internet who like to lie about their qualifications so to show you my expertise in becoming a broke loser let's do a review of my current financial and living situation so as of today I have about $650 in my
• 00:30 - 01:00 personal bank account and I have one personal credit card with a balance of about $1,580 and I have a second personal credit card with a balance of about $830 in my business bank account I currently have a balance of about $120 and on my business credit card I currently have a balance of about $3,100 now recently I acquired a couple new unexpected liabilities that made me think it's finally time to make this video so I recently scheduled a visit the dentist after being overdue for a
• 01:00 - 01:30 checkup and a couple days after I scheduled a visit I felt what I thought was a filling Fallout but unfortunately the dentist informed me that actually the tooth had fractured and it was going to need a root canal so these days a root canal costs $1,737 and apparently this one needs a crown put on top of it as well so that's another $1,500 on top of that and for those of you who are wondering about dental insurance I've done the math before and it's cheaper to not get insurance so here's those two liabilities added to the list but it's not not all bad news because I still
• 01:30 - 02:00 have a few more assets to add to the list I also have a tax-free savings account with $250 in it and I also have an RSP account with $1,620 in it and finally I also have an old Bank of America account that has around $500 US in it this will exchange to around $2,50 Canadian dollar so in terms of the immediate dental work I will be able to cover this and I've already taken steps to shut down these accounts and cash them in so this explains the current state of my balance sheet but what about my cash flow
• 02:00 - 02:30 currently the cost of my rent is $1,100 per month and for food and personal expenses I spend around $300 per month and for things like internet phone and a few other service expenses I spend around $200 a month now as of today my only source of revenu is from YouTube and over the last 6 months the revenue has been around $700 on average this leaves me with a monthly net cash flow of around $900 fortunately I do have one of the $700 YouTube payments coming in a couple days so together with my existing
• 02:30 - 03:00 bank account balance I can definitely pay rent for the month and according to the dentist the dental crown is something that I won't have done until January so in the meantime I can still use some of the cash from these liquidated Investments however this overall Financial picture is completely unsustainable in the long term now at this point you're probably wondering why don't you have more income where's all your Investments why don't you have any savings what have you been doing for the last 10 years and I'll answer all of those questions later in this video but first let's talk about my living situation for those of you who have been
• 03:00 - 03:30 following my channel for a while now you know that I'm currently being Ren evicted so I might as well provide an update on that subject so far the landlord has given out 61 eviction notices in this building alone one of which was sent to me the landlord has also filed a formal request with the Ontario tenant board to request my eviction my eviction hearing is currently scheduled for February 19th 2025 this landlord is extremely famous in Ontario and has an exponentially growing Empire of buildings what he does is buy Up Older rent controlled
• 03:30 - 04:00 buildings and immediately start issuing n13 eviction notices and waves an n13 eviction is a legal way to evict someone from a rent controlled property for extensive Renovations in these n13 eviction notices he claims that the renovation process will take 8 to 9 months and that the unit will be uninhabitable during the renovation this is despite the fact that I can personally confirm that my neighbor's apartment was renovated and that renovation took less than 2 months possibly as little as 1 month the stated reason for the so-called extensive Renovations is supposedly to replace the
• 04:00 - 04:30 plumbing Stacks however according to another tenant the bathroom Plumbing Stacks were already replaced 10 years ago and that didn't require that everyone be evicted and furthermore others have claimed that they talk to the person who has historically maintained the plumbing in this building and the claims of needing to replace the kitchen Plumbing Stacks are dubious at best and even if it was necessary to replace it doesn't require vacant possession after the n13 renovation has been completed the tenant is supposed to have the right to return to the unit however this landlord has a reputation
• 04:30 - 05:00 for not honoring that requirement and furthermore at that point you've already been displaced some results for multiple months there have been well over a 100 news articles written about what happens in these buildings after this landlord takes over a few months ago we had a fairly substantial fire in the apartment that was being occupied by the person who does the day-to-day management of this building according to the fire department the source of the fire was either an air fryer or the stove and wasn't deemed suspicious according to a tenant who lives on the same floor the smoke detector inside the individual
• 05:00 - 05:30 unit didn't go off so the fire was able to grow for quite a while until a tenant noticed it and pulled a fire alarm on that same floor the fire occurred on the floor above me and I actually witnessed smoke coming out of the top of the apartment door just before the fire department arrived and the fire was substantial enough that the firefighter needed a breathing apparatus to even enter the apartment we also experienced things like surprise inspections for unauthorized appliances like air conditioners or freezers I even got a notice for an inspection and unwanted test control treatment That Was Then
• 05:30 - 06:00 canceled at the last minute at one of the other buildings the landlord also hired security enforcement that resulted in a physical altercation with elderly tenants there this landlord is so notorious that he's even been mentioned by name in the legislative assembly of Ontario despite all of this attention on the issue nothing ever happens because these practices are entirely legal in Ontario attempting to fight back legally is also becoming increasingly difficult in Ontario many lawyers that practice tency law have shifted to do only
• 06:00 - 06:30 representing landlords and don't offer their services to tenants anymore some of you are probably thinking why not set up a tenant Union or work with organizations like Acorn a Tenants Union in this building was set up but the landlord was able to successfully intimidate the leaders of the tenant Union into giving up their apartment by issuing additional eviction notices claiming that they were a nuisance to other tenants they also returned from a brief vacation one day to find that the power to only their apartment had been shot off and that all of the food in their fridge had been warmed up and
• 06:30 - 07:00 spoiled as for acorn they have provided some introductory advice on dealing with Ren evictions and provided some emotional support for tenants they also organized some protests in terms of more specific legal action I won't say much more than that because many tenants in this building have not had their eviction hearing yet it's entirely possible that my landlord or someone who works for him may even watch this video given how much is financially at stake if you do the math on how much money you can make from evicting a building full of people who are protected under rank control it's about $1,000 per month for
• 07:00 - 07:30 a building with a 100 units that's a profit of about $100,000 per month or about $1.2 million per year currently my landlord has at least a few hundred million doar worth of assets under management and its portfolio is rapidly growing attempting to organize tenants in this situation can be very difficult because many of them have chronic physical and mental health conditions that make it difficult for them to do extensive legal research some of them are cancer patients or elderly people with Alzheimer's many many of the younger people are not doing well either
• 07:30 - 08:00 some of them are completely distracted with taking care of elderly loved ones or just barely struggling to survive financially some tenants have lost faith in our legal system and government altogether and simply consider it a foregone conclusion that the legal system will actively work against them this sentiment is not Universal but it's also not an exaggeration the mainstream media tends to downplay and contort the message of what's going on in these buildings one tenant mentioned that he was in a local coffee shop one day where he saw an older woman reading a news paper article about his own Ren eviction
• 08:00 - 08:30 he said that this lady remarked that the people in this building were all bums and just need to get jobs this is despite the fact that the man already has a full-time job now many people have arguments against the entire idea of rank control the argument is that in order to make it economically feasible to actually build new housing in this country it has to be profitable to do so and rank control makes this much more difficult this argument makes sense to me but even if you disagree with the idea of rank control I made life's decisions to stay here based on on the
• 08:30 - 09:00 understanding that rank control was a real legal protection that existed here in Ontario having to move is very disruptive not just because of higher rents my mail gets delivered here my government addresses are set to here my internet is hooked up all of the random stuff and groceries that have stocked up on even if I move some results and start paying higher rent I'm starting to wonder what I would do if I end up in this exact same situation in a few years a woman in one of the other buildings that's experiencing a rent eviction says that this is the third time that she's been in this situation now I know that
• 09:00 - 09:30 when I do a video like this there are sometimes very generous people out there who will give huge donations but I'd ask that you not do that for this video my problems are not your problems and it's not your job to fund my unsustainable lifestyle fundamentally the math here on my income just isn't working and it's my responsibility to get my monthly income up otherwise something is going to break I debated whether I should even share this information at all but since this is my real lived experience I figured it's worth sharing and if you decide to pursue an entrepreneur oral path like I
• 09:30 - 10:00 did this may very well be the outcome for you and I think it's important to provide the world with more examples of this there are a lot of motivational speakers out there who will tell you to take risks be bold Reach for the Stars not every story is a happy ending and unfortunately most business owners who find themselves in this situation are too embarrassed or psychologically compromised to talk about it as a result all you hear about are the success stories or embellishments of the truth Paul Graham has an interesting essay where he touches upon this topic I also want to point out that I'm in very close
• 10:00 - 10:30 contact with my parents and they've offered a number of times to help me out with this situation I also have family in Toronto that I can stay with temporarily if necessary I've also had some hypothetical discussions about what it would take to leave Ontario entirely and finally if you watch some of my other videos you'll see that I've passed on a number of really great employment opportunities in the past so you really don't need to feel bad for me this renovation situation has led to me getting out and talking to my neighbors more and engaging with the local community organizations these
• 10:30 - 11:00 experiences have made me much more aware of how much Society has deteriorated in the last few years and made me question why I live in kitner in the first place kitner has been going downhill over the last few years and the reasons that I chose to live here 7 years ago no longer exist so I'm honestly somewhat neutral on getting evicted I used to have a few friends from school who also lived in kitner who I meet up with regularly one of them was another entrepreneur who did quite well for himself a couple of years ago a homeless encampment started up near his house which led to things like
• 11:00 - 11:30 theft and vandalism I met up with him last summer to talk about startups and technology for a few hours he had already made a lot of the same observations that I did and decided to leave Canada entirely not long after if I'm able to win at the tenant board that'll be awesome because then I can continue to live in my apartment if I lose and get evicted that'll also be awesome because then I don't have to pay rent anymore I can also go visit with family and have new adventures it'll be lots of fun either way so you should subscribe to join in on the adventure the great thing about YouTube is that
• 11:30 - 12:00 you can just passively observe other people's situation without having to get involved and if some of you were still thinking about helping me out I'd ask that you instead just become a long-term Channel member on the 99 cent tier this way if you get buyer remorse you can just cancel in a month or so and it still helps me out the same in the long term so the next important question is what's your immediate plan what are you going to do to improve your situation the immediate plan will be to take the funds from the tfsa RSP and US bank
• 12:00 - 12:30 account and use that to fund the root canal and dental crown if necessary I can ask a family member for a small loan for a couple months to see if things improve if things don't improve or I get evicted I'll put all of my stuff in a storage unit then I'll probably coach surf for a while and spend some time with friends or relatives eventually I'll probably leave Ontario entirely and move back into my parents basement for a while as for the ren eviction I'll continue doing legal research and contest the n13 eviction process at my hearing on February 19th now I also need
• 12:30 - 13:00 to find a way to get this monthly Revenue up and I have a few ideas in mind that I'll probably try over the Christmas holidays My overall plan is to double down on producing YouTube content as crazy as that might sound YouTube is the only business activity that's shown consistent Revenue growth over the last 10 years I said before that the average monthly YouTube Revenue was around $700 but this month it's already on track to be around $900 you're probably wondering couldn't you just hustle and get another softare of vment contract and sure I
• 13:00 - 13:30 probably could but I've been doing that for 10 years now and there's just no long-term growth in doing that technically I still haven't even quit doing contract work this latest period is just the first time in 10 years where my contract work pipeline has dried up to nothing one of my long-term clients who I've worked with for over 5 years requested recently for the first time ever that we pause all future work for a while and I have a feeling that it's not coming back so yes I could get out there and hustle for more contract work but by the end of this video it should be clear
• 13:30 - 14:00 why I'm not going to do that the short version is that finding contract work is actually very easy but filtering for work that actually pays you and isn't a waste of time is nearly impossible YouTube has never made a commitment to pay me and then let me down but I can't say the same for the contract work that I've done a lot of people seem to think of pursuing YouTube as some sort of vain attempt to become a celebrity or something but I've come to view it as more of a general communication presence that any successful business needs to have nowadays in the 1970s there were only hundreds of celebrities but today
• 14:00 - 14:30 there are tens of thousands of YouTube channels that each have at least millions of subscribers having a social media presence has replaced other forms of advertising like classified ads Yellow Pages or even having a sign outside of your business in the long term I'd prefer to do better than just barely survive and to do that I have to focus on building a source of Revenue that can actually grow in the future the next thing that you're probably wondering is why don't you just get a normal 9 to5 job like regular people that's a very good question that most of
• 14:30 - 15:00 you are probably thinking right now so I'll break down my thought process on the subject for my life and career development I've decided that I need the following four things reliable cash flow compounding exponential growth human interaction and the ability to build or become a part of a community let's consider reliable cash flow first the biggest benefit of having a 9-to-5 job is the reliable cash flow and being somewhat sheltered from swings up or down in the economy having said that the concept of job security is not what it
• 15:00 - 15:30 used to be especially with the recent waves of high-tech layoffs but it is still much more stable than entrepreneurship as I've mentioned before the cash flow from the Consulting and contract work that I've done over the past 10 years has been extremely unstable but it's much worse than just getting large infrequent sums of money the biggest issue is with people paying late not paying at all or talking up a storm about some huge project or major investment that's just about to start and supposedly bring in lots of new work only to never mention it gain YouTube on
• 15:30 - 16:00 the other hand gives a consistent payout every month and as long as I don't get banned that's likely to continue for the foreseeable future the revenue could potentially go down but so far it appears unlikely that it will abruptly go to zero my next consideration is about compounding long-term growth in the 9 to5 jobs of the bygone ERA this was something that you could frequently look forward to for this I'm thinking of those people from the 1970s who worked their entire lives at a single company and moved up the corporate ladder by working position there I'm sure that
• 16:00 - 16:30 there are still isolated examples of this today but this career path is becoming increasingly rare more than likely if a company tries to sell you this vision of the future it's just a tactic to get you to work there and then throw you under the bus the instant the economy turns sour or there's some kind of corporate restructuring the other type of compounding growth that I think people don't focus enough on is in relation to skill set and personal branding if you want to get a tech job at a company today you'll have to spend your own time getting up to speed with the latest Java JavaScript Frameworks but then when you get laid off in a year
• 16:30 - 17:00 or two you'll have to spend your own time again relearning an entire new set of JavaScript Frameworks You could argue that these new Frameworks represent progress but there is a cost to keeping up with these changes and companies will push that cost onto workers as a condition of even getting employed if you calculate the cost of preparing for searching for interviewing for and getting laid off from a given job these days the total compensation could look quite a bit different younger fresh graduates are a lot more tolerant of
• 17:00 - 17:30 constantly running on this treadmill of new technologies many of which don't add significant value this is one of the reasons why companies prefer to hire younger workers instead of older ones since they're young and naive they don't realize that they're wasting their time learning a framework that no one is going to be using in a couple years another important part of your career growth to consider is to think of how much personal branding you can build from whatever you work on at a company if I told you that I personally wrote the software in the most popular app app on the first version of the Apple iPad
• 17:30 - 18:00 you might be impressed and want to hire me because of this in reality I can't say that this is true because I've never written any software for the iPad instead I wrote software for a live radio app that was intended to run on the very first version of the Blackberry playbook a commercially unsuccessful tablet that you've probably never heard of halfway through the development of this app the product manager decided to make substantial changes to the mockups of the app purely based on a whim this led to us throwing away much of the work that we had done on the app without him
• 18:00 - 18:30 ever even reviewing it even though I spent a lot of extra time and late nights making sure that the app would run well on unstable networking environments the app was never even commercially released at all and if I tell you about all of this you won't be impressed because you've never even heard about this app at all you don't even know if I just made all this up maybe I'm lying when I reflect on the software that I've been paid to write the various companies that I worked for I realize that almost every piece of software that I've been paid to write in my life has been a waste of time long
• 18:30 - 19:00 ago I worked on some user interface features for a company that did product reviews eventually this company got Acquired and the product that I worked on was shut down and no longer exists I worked for another company that was trying to build a sleazy advertising link wrapping feature the CEO insisted that I work late on more than one occasion to fix some critical bugs and produce reports eventually they gave up on this idea and the entire company no longer exists at another company that I work for we were tasked with maintaining
• 19:00 - 19:30 and upgrading a number of reports that were available on an internal portal website after doing much work to maintain the reports it came to light that no one at the company was actually using the reports and that they had in fact been written by an eccentric former employee on the unfounded assumption that the reports would be useful to someone else I also did work for a company that asked me to rewrite a server that multiplexed network communications between a large number of iot devices that were installed in vehicles I spent a lot of late nights
• 19:30 - 20:00 staying up until 3:00 a.m. to try and get the server Rewritten in time to meet the company's deadlines and performance criteria eventually I did finish the server and the company quadrupled the number of paying units soon after however the company had misrepresented their finances and imploded shortly afterward the founders simply walked away and ghosted all of the employees and contractors I don't even think that they kept the source code for anything that I wrote even though I had no control over the failure of these products I still bear the personal
• 20:00 - 20:30 branding cost associated with them another consideration is that many tech companies operate with a high level of secrecy even if you do work on something important you might not be able to talk about it when applying for new jobs on the other hand I found that every piece of content that I publish online has a very small but incremental compounding benefit each time that I release a new video the individual video doesn't make much money or attention but it does cause a little bit more traffic on everything else that I've published in the past all of the abandoned software
• 20:30 - 21:00 that I've written will have exactly zero benefit to society over the next 10 years however at least a few of the videos that I've published will probably have some benefit to someone over that same time period I'm not trying to pursue some sort of idealistic goal about changing the world or maximizing impact I'm just trying to be practical about what I think is going to be relevant in the long term an economy that's based on writing garbage software that immediately gets shut down or abandoned after doesn't seem very sustainable to me so far I've been very wrong on this take but I keep coming
• 21:00 - 21:30 back to one of Warren Buffett's favorite sayings and that is that if something cannot go on forever it will eventually stop now the third item on the list is human interaction at almost every corporate job that I've ever worked at I'd be in almost constant isolation either in a cubicle or a room by myself or in noisy opened office spaces where everyone just wears headphones all the time sometimes we would have meetings or standup but these were always high stress interactions that would focus exclusively on the low-level details of
• 21:30 - 22:00 work I've talked in other videos about the 10,000 yard dare and cubical life that I experience that Amazon and Nvidia and other companies are only marginally better when I talk about things like this there will no doubt be some people mostly managers who say things like our company culture is not like that at all we have a fun corporate environment we have Nerf gun battles and a foosball table that you're welcome to play any time of day at one of the companies that I work for we had mojito Fridays where
• 22:00 - 22:30 we would all take off work at 400 p.m. and make mojitos and other alcoholic drinks after having starred at our screens all week our conversations would usually devolve into a discussion of whatever Jura ticket we were working on for some people the corporate social environment of mojito Fridays is exactly what they're looking for but I'm not one of those people and the last item on the list is the ability to build or become a part of a community in the corporate world attempting to build your own community is likely something that could
• 22:30 - 23:00 get you fired of course you could call the company itself a community but for obvious reasons the values and goals of the company don't always align with and sometimes actively work against the values and goals of the employees on the other hand I've recently started to think more about how YouTube could be used as a vehicle for building a so-called Community I'm actually somewhat surprised at how many interactions I've had with people that I know in real life through YouTube clearly a lot of people watch YouTube and the possibility always exists to
• 23:00 - 23:30 convert these online interactions into real world ones I don't have much time to focus on this right now but this is something that I do think about for the future and so for the reasons that I've just described in this video and others I've decided that I'll never be returning to a traditional corporate software development job under any circumstances the next important question is why don't you have any savings what have you been doing for the last 10 years the short answer is I've just never been able to produce meaningful income here's a brief summary of my pre-university years I was born in
• 23:30 - 24:00 the middle of nowhere in New brunwick Canada and did a bit of work in the forestry industry growing up at 19 I moved out of my parents place to live with a friend in a nearby City at this time I had around $5,000 in savings and my pipe dream was to make money by day trading stocks I spent a lot of time learning about and watching the stock market all day I came to the conclusion that in order to be competitive in the stock market I'd have to learn how to do automated trading using software specific specifically artificial intelligence I got a full-time job as a
• 24:00 - 24:30 stock clerk at a local Bulk Food Store and continued studying the stock market and software development on the side this was in 2007 and I can remember watching and rewatching one very specific Google tech talk by Jeffrey Hinton on restricted boltman machines back then I actually started trying to replicate some of Jeffrey hinton's work based on recognizing handwritten digits since I had no formal education in software development I didn't get very far with the autom trading I had written thousands of lines of Visual Basic code
• 24:30 - 25:00 to do back testing of moving average based stock trading strategies and this code would cause my computer to reboot whenever it ran for long periods of time in hindsight I probably had a memory leak it was around this time that I started to think more seriously about going to University when I applied to the University of watero they said that since I was applying as a mature student that I should first complete their self-study pre-university courses which were supposed to be a refresher of high school however I found that these
• 25:00 - 25:30 courses were not a refresher at all and they covered completely new material that I had never seen in high school in hindsight doing these pre-university courses was absolutely necessary after doing these pre-university courses that waterl had suggested to me they actually rejected me possibly because I was a bit slow in finishing some of these pre-university courses I was ready to accept this rejection but my father insisted on calling the university and asking why as a result I was put on a weit list which did lead to a conditional acceptance to the software engineering program starting in 2009
• 25:30 - 26:00 completing the software engineering program at the University of watero took four years and 8 months and consisted of eight study terms mixed with six work terms on the day of my last exam I had $ 53922 in my bank account I also had no student loans since the co-op placements were able to fund my education which I estimate cost around $80,000 after graduation almost all of my peers moved to the United States to take full-time positions I wanted to start my own
• 26:00 - 26:30 business though and didn't have any kind of Visa sponsorship to live in the states so I chose to stay in Canada back in 2014 Canada was a politically stable country with a bright future ahead of it at the time I also still had a bit of a social network here of other entrepreneurial friends I officially Incorporated my business on July 4th 2014 and immediately began reaching out to people in my network to try and secure my first contract by August 13th I had secured my first contract with a struggling startup in Toronto that
• 26:30 - 27:00 produced audio related software around this time I did everything that I could think of to try and start securing more contracts I emailed basically everyone that I had networked with during my undergraduate degree I asked many of my former professors if they'd be open to meeting with me and discussing my business Ambitions for a while I also just walked into local businesses here in kitner and asked if I could chat with them about their business needs to try and pin down the market Niche to go after I also tried making some Direct Mail flyers for a while and mailed them out to specific companies another thing
• 27:00 - 27:30 that I started doing around this time was writing blog posts as a form of content marketing one interesting Insight from talking with some of my professors was just how easy it is to get into grad school I asked a few different professors if they had any kind of research work contracts that I could do I had a couple different professors who were interested in the idea but they said that I could only get the contract work within the context of grad school from what I recall it had something to do with the funding for the contract only being available if I was enrolled in a grad school program I
• 27:30 - 28:00 explained that I wasn't interested in grad school but one of the ideas that was floated for a while is that I could just enroll in grad school to get the contract and then just skip all of the classes and fail out of the program since I didn't care about it anyway this seemed a bit convoluted and the potential pay was quite low so I didn't end up pursuing this route during this period I quickly discovered that the most likely reason that a potential lead wouldn't work out was because all companies only wanted to hire full-time employees and didn't want to work with independent contractors to me the whole
• 28:00 - 28:30 point of starting a Consulting business was to get a lot of high quality work going at the same time and then start hiring employees to do the work train them and build up the business as for the first contract that I had secured with the company in Toronto I had negotiated a higher hourly rate on the basis that my work would be temporary until they found a dedicated full-time employee I started to think that maybe this would be the winning business model to fill a role temporarily at a higher lucrative rate and until the company found a cheaper full-time employee the
• 28:30 - 29:00 first contract ended around the start of 2015 so by this time I had a little bit of savings to work with during this period I took some time to further develop a side project that I'd been working on over the last few years which was a self-compiled to run inside of a very simple emulator since I was a fresh University graduate my mind was still focused on grandiose academic topics one of the last courses that I had done in University involved using static analysis tools like City to discover
• 29:00 - 29:30 bugs and software I figured that if I could develop my compiler and make it good enough there might be a business model in selling software for a more intelligent compiler with better static analysis and error messages built into it my longterm goal was never to stay doing consulting and contract work forever but instead to get enough cash flow and business experience that I could bootstrap a real startup with an actual product in 2015 I pursued a huge number of potential business leads a few of which actually resulted in Revenue
• 29:30 - 30:00 one of which was actually initially advertised as a volunteer position I decided to respond to the ad anyway just to see what was out there I would describe the company's product as something like a very aspirational Community or social network for people who want to do charity work I found some of the products messaging to be a bit strange and confusing at the time but years later when the wi charity Scandal made headlines I saw where some of the inspiration came from in order to do the development work of the website the pattern that the founder was using was
• 30:00 - 30:30 to recruit students from Conestoga college for unpaid internships many of these students didn't have the qualifications to do the work and in some cases these were embedded system students who were now being tasked with doing complex web development work I tried to train some of these students so that they could do the development work but the founder would grow impatient if the students weren't immediately productive at one point I think we had four of these unpaid interns and the founder was still trying to bring more of them on board eventually some of these unpaid volunteers quit and by this
• 30:30 - 31:00 point I was already very familiar with the company's platform since I had been trying to train these students to do the actual work I was in an ideal position to just go ahead and do the work myself so I suggested to the founder that I could do some of this work for a discounted hourly rate since I had initiated this engagement as a volunteer I was very careful to be extremely clear about the terms of the paid work that I was proposing I clearly spelled out how much I would be invoicing for and the exact dates upon which I would send
• 31:00 - 31:30 those invoices and the founder explicitly agreed that they understood almost immediately after I had issued one of the first invoices for the work I had done the founder said that they didn't have any money to pay the invoice at one point during this engagement the founder abruptly told me that I should expect a phone call from someone who is reviewing one of the company's Grant applications without providing much context about the expected call when the grant reviewer called me he mentioned that even he didn't have much context about this company's product he didn't
• 31:30 - 32:00 even know the website address so I provided the reviewer with the website address so that they could take a look at the product the grant reviewer also mentioned that the founder had claimed to have obtained a patent for their product but the application reviewer hadn't been able to confirm this at the time I recognized this claim as one that the founder had repeated to me on multiple occasions I believe that the supposed feature that this founder had supposedly patented was effectively a set of coefficients on a linear equation that was used for boring someone on a personality quiz after I had the call
• 32:00 - 32:30 with the person who was reviewing the Grant application I learned that the founder was quite upset that I had given the website address of the product to the grant reviewer I finished up the in progress work on this contract and became busy with other contracts shortly afterward another engagement that I had around the same time was from a man in the United States who had a full-time job working sales he had a number of different business ideas and some kind of node.js application for collecting leads he sent me a copy of this application without much context I tried
• 32:30 - 33:00 to get it running but it seemed like there were parts of it that were missing I asked him a few follow-up questions about this application and instead of answering my questions he instead sent me another unrelated piece of software for another business idea that also seemed incomplete he seemed to switch topics a lot and shift his Focus wildly between different hypothetical business ideas for this contract I did build for a few hours of General Consulting but we never actually did pin down what piece of software to build another noteworthy lead from around this time was from a
• 33:00 - 33:30 local government funded organization that shall remain nameless this organization supposedly supported Innovation through programs that were funded on the taxpayers dollar for this lead I didn't quite understand what the goal of the project was but I ended up taking a meeting with them to discuss what the goals were for their project from what I could understand this organization had done a startup acquisition of some kind of web service from a small startup in the area and they wanted to further develop this into some kind of product the person that I met with talked very highly of their
• 33:30 - 34:00 organization and the product that they had acquired but I still couldn't quite figure out what they wanted me to do even after asking a lot of pointed questions for example I asked them if the application had many active users already this is very important to know because developing on a production application is very different from building one from scratch specifically a production application requires much more care in maintaining the contents of the database you need to add things like database migration and maintain the Integrity of the data
• 34:00 - 34:30 throughout the migration but in a from scratch application you can just Elite the entire database every time you do a deployment when I asked how many active users they had this person first suggested that it was a very popular app and many people depended on it however after talking with them for a while it was clear that absolutely no one was using this application the person seemed to sheepishly admit at one point that they were under some kind of contractual obligation to keep developing the app and that my role was just to keep keep developing the app without any specific
• 34:30 - 35:00 goal in mind there was also another employee of this organization who was supposed to be present at this meeting and furthermore he supposedly had a grand vision of what this application would become even though he was invited in advance he never showed up to the meeting or responded to phone calls or emails throughout the duration of the meeting and so I never got to hear what his Grand ideas actually were I tried cloning and running the application but the version of the software on the master Branch didn't run they were still in contact with the original developers who had moved on to other projects and
• 35:00 - 35:30 they suggested trying out one of the other 50 branches of this application the whole thing seemed a bit sketchy to me so I decided to pass on it I also had a number of other bogus leads during this period I also distinctly remember talking to one potential lead who I would describe as a much less successful and much less charismatic version of Andrew Tate he spent about an hour talking to me about his business Ambitions while working out on the treadmill I could barely hear anything that that he was saying but I do recall that he thought very highly of himself
• 35:30 - 36:00 he just seemed to want to tell me about how great he was and didn't really have any software that he needed developed for a while I also entertained the idea of building websites for small businesses that didn't have them yet I thought my sales strategy could just be to physically walk around and look at businesses and then look up if they had a website if they didn't I would just walk in and try to sell them one I recall visiting one pizza shop that didn't have a website and the son of the business owner seemed very keen on talking to me me for a long period of time but they never really seemed to
• 36:00 - 36:30 want to commit to anything instead they just tried to haggle over the potential hosting costs for a few dollars a month another local business that I visited was a print and copy store the store wasn't visible from the road and the owner lamented the fact that he had switched leases with another tenant who had better Road visibility they didn't have a website and at first seemed very interested in getting one I immediately went home and came up with a specific proposal and a quote that I thought would work for them when I came back and presented it to them they seemed to have
• 36:30 - 37:00 completely lost interest in the idea about 6 months later their business had completely disappeared and the unit was vacant overall I came to the conclusion that if a business didn't already have a website then they didn't want one at all I also talked to one potential client who wanted to develop an app that was effectively designed for helicopter parents who want to monitor everything that their child does they didn't have any money to fund the development and the whole idea seemed a bit overzealous and intrusive I mentioned previously that blogging was
• 37:00 - 37:30 one of the things that I tried as a form of content marketing some of my blog posts ended up on Hacker News and I figured that if I could develop more of a following there then maybe I could get some contract work with Y combinator companies I actually know quite a few people personally who have gone through the Y combinator program and one of them told me that at one point I was actually recommended on an internal YC list serve although I don't have access to this so I can't confirm it I do recall getting at least one inquiry from someone doing a y combinator startup but they were
• 37:30 - 38:00 only looking for a full-time employee and as soon as I mentioned a business relationship they lost all interest I also tried posting once on one of The Hacker News threads for people looking for contract work and mentioned my services from this I got several calls and emails from one very persistent individual who proposed that I should sign a non-disclosure agreement before he would even brief me on the idea because apparently it contained some military stuff I told him that there was absolutely no way that I would sign his NDA and he proceeded to tell me anyway
• 38:00 - 38:30 his idea was effectively identical to the one shown in Mark Rover's famous glitter bomb video except in his case he wanted to use a custom embedded device instead of using a cell phone for the network connection this brings us to about the year 2016 during this year I did a contract for a custom WordPress theme the lead came from a result of networking with another local small Consulting business that made custom websites initially I was a bit confused because I
• 38:30 - 39:00 thought this consulting company was subcontracting some of their work to me but in reality the person who ended up briefing me on the details of this project was actually a friend of the founder of the consulting company when I met this person I learned that the actual website was going to be for an industrial company in Alberta and that I was to act as a subcontractor for this individual after discussing the project and contract details I signed a contract with the person who was subcontracting this work to me almost immediately after we signed the contract they suggested that we should change the contract so
• 39:00 - 39:30 that the client listed in the contract would be the company in Alberta and not the person I was talking to their reasoning was that this would save them a little bit of money on sales tax since the rate was lower in Alberta I then asked him to sign a termination statement for the current contract and we did end up involving the other party to act as a client on the contract this contract only produced a few thousand in Revenue throughout this period I continued going to network events to try and get more business leads one lead
• 39:30 - 40:00 that I entertained ended up being an elderly man who wanted to build automated day trading software that was based on a betting strategy that is effectively known as a Martin Gale a logically flawed betting system that is well understood mathematically I explained to him why his system wouldn't work but he wasn't convinced he also tried to get me to work for $30 an hour around this time I think I was still quoting people $50 an hour I also talked to a middle-aged divorce woman at a Meetup event who was thinking about starting some sort of food catering
• 40:00 - 40:30 business and wanted to involve software somehow after talking with her for a while it occurred to me that she was just lonely and didn't have any serious business Ambitions at all in late 2015 I had also started teaching as a part-time professor at Conestoga College the main thing that I had been doing to try and get new contracts was visit lots of networking events by chance at a talk that I attended I happened to sit next to one of the engineering department chairs at Koga College I only had a chance to speak with him for a few minutes before the talk started and I
• 40:30 - 41:00 mentioned my C compiler and operating system project that i' been working on for a while he mentioned that they were looking for professors and that I should send him an email so of course I did send him an email not expecting to hear back but to my surprise about a week later I had a teaching contract at Koga College there's a lot that I could say about my experience teaching at the college but I'll probably have to split that out into a separate video because there's just too much to say the long story short of why I didn't continue teaching at Conestoga College was just
• 41:00 - 41:30 because of how time-consuming it was for a part-time Professor the hourly compensation rate makes it seem like it's fairly well paid but the reality is that the amount of time that you're paid for and the amount of time that it takes to actually teach the course are completely disconnected my teaching contract only paid me for the scheduled lecture time when I stood in front of the class to teach things like creating tests marking tests creating course material responding to student emails these were all volunteer activities that were expected to be covered by the
• 41:30 - 42:00 hourly lecture rate the college also had extremely poor public transit access since I don't have a car my only option to get to the college was to take public transit which was extremely overcrowded with students there were several days when it took over 3 hours and three transfers for me to get home from the college by bus when an equivalent car ride would have taken 20 minutes this might sound like an exaggeration but I can assure you that it's not during the last term that I taught at Conestoga College a strike happened which lasted
• 42:00 - 42:30 just under 5 weeks since I wasn't teaching during those weeks I didn't get paid but I was still expected to return at a moment's notice at some unknown time in the future the strike was extremely stressful on students and faculty from what I learned while working there a similar strike happened a few years prior and the reasons for the current strike were mostly related to broken promises made during the end of the last strike during the brief time that I taught there there was also Al a public transit strike which made it even more difficult to get to the college one
• 42:30 - 43:00 of the next paid contracts that I actually did quite a bit of work on involved writing software to produce reports I won't be more specific than that but I will say that it's one of the better contracts that I've had over the years this contract lasted until recently and theoretically it could start back up in the future however on more than one occasion with this contract there have been many months long periods where payments have been late and for multiple months in a row the response would be oh I'll definitely pay that tomorrow for this contract the
• 43:00 - 43:30 payments have always eventually come but sometimes I have to wait a while teaching at the college and working on the reports contract kept me busy for most of 2016 and 2017 in 2018 I also started work on a contract with a local company that was producing iot software and Hardware this company had actually existed for 7 or eight years now and I had actually been recommended to the company by a couple other Engineers that I know to be competent ENT and trustworthy one of these Engineers had done contract work with the company for
• 43:30 - 44:00 multiple years now so it seemed fairly safe and established the company wanted me to rewrite a server that processed data packets from a fleet of iot devices the primary goal of my work was to reduce the amount of data that was being used by these Network packets in order to reduce the company's mobile data costs I had always wanted to do a contract where I negotiated some sort of performance upside for myself so I came to an agreement in the contract that if if I met their data reduction goals that I would get a bonus after a few months
• 44:00 - 44:30 of work I was able to complete this work and deploy it to production around this time they were almost 1 month late on one of my previous invoices which did concern me but one of the previous invoices was also paid late so it wasn't completely abnormal since I had just completed and verified the data production goal around this time I issued my regular monthly invoice along with another invoice for the performance bonus unfortunately the company had substantially misrepresented their finances and it was at exactly this time
• 44:30 - 45:00 that they started to implode however at the time they were not clear about this at all even as much as a year later they were still trying to suggest that they were just about to get a huge investment and that everything would be great again eventually the CEO of the company was fired by the board of directors and in subsequent court filings they attempted to claim that the company had actually gone defunct long ago this is despite the fact that just weeks prior to the claims that they submitted to the court they had attempted to restart the company under a different name I knew
• 45:00 - 45:30 the employees who worked there well and one of them tipped me off to this fact they had hired another local consulting company and attempted to continue development work on the product shortly after they started this new relationship fell apart and work on the product stopped entirely just before they ran out of money they even persuaded a recently hired employee to put business expenses on their personal credit card and then laid the person off shortly after and and didn't reimburse them for the expenses until they filed a legal
• 45:30 - 46:00 claim to collect unpaid wages initially some employees were still being paid and kept coming into the office so I gave the company a few months to get the refar and order but once it seemed inevitable that the company was going to fail I put in a claim in small claims court hoping that I might get something once the company's assets are liquidated in total the company owed me about $188,000 for a couple months of work in the performance bonus I had already seen some of their financial and I knew that they did have around $20,000 in Revenue per month and my work
• 46:00 - 46:30 specifically had reduced their expenses by about $4,000 a month so I thought that there was at least some hope that I would get paid or that there would be at least some proceeds from selling off the functioning business components I requested an examination Hearing in small claims court which they failed to attend and in late 2019 I was able to get the directors of the company to provide me with some closure on the company's financial situation by threatening to submit a letter to the judge requesting that the court find the
• 46:30 - 47:00 directors of the company in contempt of court for missing the examination hearing at this point the directors did produce some Financial records which made it clear that the company had millions of dollars in unsecured creditors and effectively no unsecured assets to dispose of the few assets that they did have were secured by bank loans including one from the Canadian government the amount of drama that took place at this company was absolutely incredible and I think it would have made for an excellent script on the TV show Silicon Valley when I started
• 47:00 - 47:30 working with this company they mentioned another consultant who had started working with them about 6 months prior they said that they had hired him specifically to improve the product quality and to organize the team better the way that they described him made it sound like this person was effectively going to be my manager at the time I thought great there's lots of issues that I can see with this product so I can talk to this guy and we can come up with a plan to fix all the issues in the the product however after working with them for a while this guy never seemed
• 47:30 - 48:00 to be around when I was there visiting their office the founders had once said to me that this person was supposedly writing unit tests for the database this sounded a bit strange to me but I attributed this to the fact that the founders were not that familiar with software development themselves and maybe just use strange wording I figured maybe he's just writing some unit tests for the data access layer as I gained more access to their systems and learned about what everyone there was working on I realized realized that I didn't know where the git repo was for whatever this guy was working on I mentioned to the
• 48:00 - 48:30 founders that we really ought to make sure that whatever software he's writing is checked in somewhere I started to talk to more developers at the company to learn more about the history of this manager consultant person according to one employee they had only ever received one email from this person which contained a document describing coding standards he showed me this document and I was able to identify it as a plagiarized version of Google's coding standard for the Java programming language the consultant had simply removed any attribution to Google and
• 48:30 - 49:00 replaced it with the name of the company that he was Consulting for when we asked him about the code that he was writing he simply sent a large zip file of the repo with no Source control we asked if he had a version of the code that tracked the history from the company's Mainline Branch but he said that since the company never gave him right access to the repo he had to develop outside of source control which is of course nonsense in the meantime he had simply been sending the founders random invoices in the amount of2 to $4,000 for these so-called unit tests I spent way
• 49:00 - 49:30 too much time digging into the code that he sent to see if there was anything there that we should try to merge in what I found was a bunch of autogenerated empty unit test stubs that didn't actually test anything he claimed to have written thousands of these lines of Code by hand but in reality he used a code generation tool and then deleted the autogenerated stubs that give attribution to the code generation tool I know that this is true because he forgot to delete some of the comment stubs which allowed me to track down the
• 49:30 - 50:00 exact version of the tool that he used and reproduce his results exactly the founders didn't really understand what he was working on and continued to give him the benefit of the doubt but as soon as they started asking more detailed questions about the unit tests he threatened to sue them at one point a very physically fit man claiming to be the consultant CEO visited the startup company during this interaction the so-called CEO said that he sympathized with the startup Founders and that he was disappointed in the consultant's work products he apparently said that if
• 50:00 - 50:30 the positions were reversed he would not have paid for the work that the consultant delivered either then later that day this same CEO person threatened to sue them again in doing this Consulting work for the company the consultant had Incorporated a special purpose shell company specifically for this contract the address of his business was a vacant unit in a nearby Business Center I did a bunch of Googling about this person's details and I just couldn't stop digging because things got weird and weirder I came across a news article about someone with
• 50:30 - 51:00 the exact same name from another Province who was apparently busted for running a medical marijuana growing operation with an expired license from the wrong Province I also found a record of a grant being issued from the Canadian government to one of this person's businesses for a supposed hydroponic lettuce growing business I also found some SEC filings related to cryptocurrency icos in his name and evidence that he had financial success in developing a network of hundreds of lowquality mobile phone games that made money selling advertisements it was
• 51:00 - 51:30 around this time that it became clear to me that my existing business model wasn't working I had initially thought that at least one of my clients would eventually become a stable business and start sending me lots of highquality work but that never happened I can understand that sometimes businesses don't work out but I was unprepared for the level of unprofessional behavior that most of these businesses exhibit 2019 was the first year when I started experimenting with Kickstarter campaigns on the side I was still looking to pick
• 51:30 - 52:00 up new Consulting and contract leads around this time but it seemed like things were a bit more difficult than they were in the 2014 2015 era I set up one small Kickstarter campaign about using SSH to do remote backups I didn't do any work to advertise this campaign at all and it got $390 in pledges $390 is not a lot of money but for having done almost no marketing it made me think that maybe there was something there after this I did four more Kickstarter campaigns and each one made
• 52:00 - 52:30 successively more money the fifth campaign that I did was for regular expression fridge magnets and this campaign made over $45,000 this was enough money to make me think that there might be a business model behind repeatedly doing these small campaigns I thought maybe I could build a list of repeat customers and then start using social media advertising to get new customers and Achieve growth around this time I started experimenting with paid advertising on different platforms like Facebook Twitter and Google ads I also
• 52:30 - 53:00 started my YouTube channel around this time and some of my initial content is from these Kickstarter campaigns at first I was able to make a handful of sales through paid advertising but I was never quite able to achieve a positive return on ad spend I think the limiting factor in my case was that I just didn't have enough sales and marketing data to make the ad targeting effective enough around 2021 the iOS 14 advertising apocalypse happened this event along with the Fallout from things like the Cambridge analytica Scandal made
• 53:00 - 53:30 Facebook advertising much less effective I also noticed around this time that the Kickstarter campaigns I was doing became much less effective and were only able to make a few hundred what I think was happening was that my Kickstarter campaigns were inadvertently benefiting from the targeted advertising of other people's Facebook campaigns using Facebook ads to direct traffic to Kickstarter campaigns was quite common around this time and many people who convert on a given Kickstarter campaign are also likely to make a pledge to a
• 53:30 - 54:00 second Kickstarter campaign if you make a pledge on a given campaign Kickstarter will start recommending similar campaigns to you when Facebook traffic was cheap and effective I think there was a huge surplus of this warm traffic from Facebook and I was able to pick up the scraps without spending anything on advertising in 2023 I was fortunate enough to get another software development contract from the company of someone that I knew from University from a pure business perspective perspective this contract was the best one that I ever had in my 10 years of doing this
• 54:00 - 54:30 Consulting business they paid me on time the project goal was well defined and compartmentalized and the work appeared to actually serve a meaningful business purpose the development work itself wasn't very exciting it involved picking up a stalled project migration and getting it deployed to production the project only lasted about 6 months and once it was completed the company sought full-time employees to maintain it by this point my viewership on YouTube had been growing for a while now and I was still doing a bit of work on the reporting contract June 2023 was the
• 54:30 - 55:00 first corporate year end where I recorded revenue from YouTube in the amount of $495 and for the June 2024 corporate year end I recorded revenue from YouTube in the amount of $652 so here's a graph that shows a breakdown of all my Revenue in every year over the last 10 years in total over the last 10 years my business has produced around 200 $57,000 in Revenue mostly from eight distinct clients as you can see the
• 55:00 - 55:30 revenue is pitifully small and shows no signs of growth in fact I've only ever had one year where I made more than $30,000 and last year I made almost as much money is the first year that I started and on top of that almost all living expenses are now twice what they were 10 years ago now it's worth asking where did this $257,000 go over that time about 110,000 became payroll toward myself about 30,000 went toward operating expenses
• 55:30 - 56:00 and around 30,000 was reinvested in the business for things like business experiments computers and hard drives the camera that's in front of me right now I spent around 25,000 in accounting and legal fees about 10,000 went to employee and employer contributions to the Canadian pension plan and about 5,000 went to corporate and other payroll taxes over this period of time I've personally spent around $120,000 on rent you might be wondering how is it possible that you spent $120,000 on rent but you've only paid
• 56:00 - 56:30 yourself $110,000 and the answer is that I've had a family member as a roommate for some of the last 10 years as of today I have absolutely no equity in any form of real estate and I'm just barely hanging on to my apartment reflecting on the last 10 years I can give you the following insights isolated and self-contained software development projects are extremely rare and most of the work that companies want done always requires integrated communication it requires
• 56:30 - 57:00 many back and forth emails meetings clarifications Corrections this is one of the main reasons why companies don't want to hire an external contractor another major reason is part of the whole pump and dump model of venture capital funded startups the goal for most of these companies is not to actually run them and produce economically valuable output instead it's to get acquired by Google or Microsoft and the amount of payout from an acquisition will usually be based on the company's headcount this means that
• 57:00 - 57:30 it's better to have 100 employees that are doing nothing at the time of an acquisition than it is to have one external contractor who productively runs your entire business you may have been misled in the past into thinking that companies prefer to hire external contractors since there are some benefits like not needing to do payroll or pay health benefits however many of the articles that you read about it being better or cheaper to hire external contractors are actually just propaganda written by consultants and contractors
• 57:30 - 58:00 themselves to try and get business the other major mistake that I made was in assuming that most entrepreneurs actually want to produce economically useful outputs in reality most entrepreneurs especially Tech entrepreneurs are really just scamming investors or the government a fairly common model that Founders follow looks something like this raise venture capital for a company based on a pitch that follows whatever the current Trend or virtue signal is whether that's big data Internet of Things artificial intelligence or climate change then
• 58:00 - 58:30 assign yourself the role of CEO or CTO and pay yourself at least $170,000 per year with some extra benefits and bonuses sprinkled on top additionally network with prominent people in your industry and government maybe even get some of them to join your board of directors next try to get your company additional Investments through some kind of taxpayer funded Innovation initiative once you get the investment do the bare minimum to keep the company running until you run out of funding and
• 58:30 - 59:00 can't raise any more rounds then the company will eventually fail or get acquired for an amount of money that's less than the sum of the input Investments to the uninformed general public this might even look like success at this point though you've already been paying yourself a handsome salary for years and you can just shrug your shoulders and say oh well I tried you might even get to liquidate a bit of your Equity even if the company is acquired at a loss this strategy is not ethical or economically sustainable
• 59:00 - 59:30 which is why I haven't pursued it at all I don't advise you to do any of this but this is an extremely common strategy that I've observed this topic is one that I've wanted to discuss for a while now and now that there are more examples of this being reported in the mainstream news I can hopefully convince you that what you see reported in the mainstream media is just the tip of the iceberg these kinds of things are highly unethical and I don't advise you to do any of them but unfortunately this is increasingly becoming the only way to run a successful business in this
• 59:30 - 60:00 country white collar crime in Canada is starting to get out of control and it's starting to compete with the regular civilian economy this ecosystem of unproductive startups wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the substantial misallocation of taxpayer money that you see repeatedly reported in the news today case studies like GC strategies the sdtc fund the Wii charity Scandal are all perfect examples even in my tiny business I've occasionally gotten cold calls from companies offering to do grants for me for a cut
• 60:00 - 60:30 of the action this is despite the fact that in the last few years I basically never get new software development leads anymore back when I first started I did get a few inbound leads here and there but that's mostly dried up The Narrative of the last decade has been that software developers are in extremely short supply but I think that the actual truth is that good leadership is in short supply basically all of the high-paying Tech work is concentrated at the big tech company and everything outside of that is mostly just unproductive nonsense on the other
• 60:30 - 61:00 hand I do probably get about five emails a day from other software development companies wanting to sell their services to me even in just the last few days I received a couple emails from people looking for work having said this if you look at the content that I've been posting on social media over the last couple years you might say that the reason I don't get Consulting leads anymore is because a lot of the stuff that I publish is quite unprofessional but the reality is this is the only type of content that's shown any growth for me I've been quite professional and
• 61:00 - 61:30 obedient for pretty much my entire life and that didn't get me anywhere so I'm going to stop doing that now switching topics back to my future and living situation you might be wondering why don't I get a roommate again to help pay the rent I actually had been thinking about getting a roommate again recently unfortunately according to my new landlord I am not allowed to have roommates even though I pay for a two-bedroom apartment from what I understand this is not consistent with existing tency law so it's yet another thing that I'll have to fight for the
• 61:30 - 62:00 landlord and ten board as I mentioned before I'm starting to become a bit neutral on the idea of getting evicted having to fight against Draconian restrictions like this is becoming more and more common here in Ontario and if the conditions for a normal human life don't exist here anymore then maybe it's time to move somewh else the next question that you're probably wondering is why don't you have a dual- income household why are you not married why don't you have a family of your own there's a lot that could be said about this topic but the short version is that almost every environment that I've been
• 62:00 - 62:30 in in my adult life has been almost 100% male 100% senior citizens or both growing up I lived in the middle of nowhere in a rural area populated mostly by elderly farmers in 2009 I moved up here to Ontario to study software engineering and I still have my original class photo list from when I first started looking at the class list right now I count 7 out of 117 or about 5% of the start in class was female now let's take a look at my graduating class I count five out of 85 or about 6% of the
• 62:30 - 63:00 graduating class was female however this can be an overestimate of the gender ratio since a few of my elective classes such as real-time programming were literally 100% male now you could say but Robert you've got to get out there meet people outside your program go to extracurricular activities and that's true so I did for a while I actually took dancing lessons at the University of watero but even this was about 70% male since there were not enough women to pair people up some of the men would
• 63:00 - 63:30 end up dancing by themselves or dancing with another man I also found that dancing lessons require a surprising amount of focus and practice I was never really good at it and I didn't particularly enjoy it in my opinion dancing lessons don't provide a great venue to get to know someone anyway as you might expect the gender ratio of the workplace in Tech isn't much different now this is kind of an exaggeration but since I've started doing software development I've never actually had a female cooworker who I worked with on a daily basis of course many roles in HR and marketing are usually filled by
• 63:30 - 64:00 women but my jobs usually have little to no interaction with these teams now the exceptions are I did have a female boss on four different occasions I also had a period of about a couple months during one Co-op placement where I did sort of have a female cooworker I would usually say hi to her when I arrived at work in the morning although she almost never responded I don't think she was being rude I think it was just an Autism Spectrum thing I also think that I might have had a female team member for a brief period of time just before I left Amazon although I never interacted with
• 64:00 - 64:30 this person and she worked remotely in doing my contract work over the years I have occasionally interacted with female managers and product managers and at Conestoga College there were a few older married female professors who I interacted with occasionally now you could say you've got to meet people outside of work go to events and that's true you can when I was at Amazon I did go to local networking events for a while since so many of the people in Seattle work at Amazon a lot of them are just other men who are exactly like me with the same idea I also talked in my
• 64:30 - 65:00 other video about how the entire team had to stay late on Valentine's Day to release Amazon red shift and many of the full times had to work past midnight on this day when you combine this with the fact that full-time employees also have to do on call work this doesn't give you a lot of opportunity to develop a personal life now the next question you're probably thinking is surely in the last 20 years you must have met some people outside of work or school so for compl completeness I've constructed this diagram which illustrates every time that I can recall going on a date with a
• 65:00 - 65:30 woman or being in a relationship during undergrad the usual pattern was that I'd meet someone and have a handful of interactions with them as the term picked up we'd both become so busy that both of our schedules would always be in Conflict then after the four-month term was up we'd both be in different provinces or countries and never really see each other again after I graduated I sacrificed a lot of personal time to try and build up the business I had hoped that things would pick up and that I'd naturally build up a community of people around me in 2018 I started to think
• 65:30 - 66:00 that business was finally picking up and that I'd be able to bank a lot of money that is of course just before the company that I was doing work for started to implode since they never made it clear that they were giving up on their business and in fact said the opposite as much as a year later I wasted a lot of time chasing them around in court hoping to recover some of the money that they owed and on top of that I had to scrambled to try and look for more contracts to make up for the incoming shortfall late 2019 was when I finally got closure on the Lost income
• 66:00 - 66:30 and started to get my momentum back then a couple months later in 2020 a global pandemic happened and this caused some of my other work to be canceled so again I was scrambling to try and find new sources of revenue and I almost forgot during the pandemic you weren't allowed to go anywhere or do anything then in 2023 the building that I live in was bought by the famous Ren eviction landlord and for 2024 most of my spare time has gone toward trying to avoid getting Ren evicted when the ren evictions first started I actually
• 66:30 - 67:00 thought that this might be a great opportunity for me to start meeting people again and work together to fight the ren eviction process unfortunately Society has deteriorated a lot more than I had thought in the last few years and many people seem to be struggling with serious mental physical and financial issues in meeting some of the other tenants who live here one of the things that I paid attention to was are there any single women who are less than 65 years of age who live in this building and so far I haven't met any however it's not all bad news now I don't mean
• 67:00 - 67:30 to brag but since the ren eviction started I do have semi-regular contact with about four or five elderly women who live in this building sometimes I meet them on the sidewalk and help them carry their groceries home I also try to keep them updated on the current renovation situation so if you're looking to meet elderly single women I can testify that kitner is definitely the place to be the ren evictions in this building have caused a lot of tenant turnover and a lot Ed me to meet even more new people recently I've networked a bit with some of the new tenants who were replacing the old ones
• 67:30 - 68:00 many of them are immigrant families with young children who just arrived from countries like erria Sudan Lebanon and India when I meet them in the lobby or the elevator I'll usually chat with them a bit to try and get to know them better many of them seem quite friendly although often when I try to have an extended conversation with them a lot of them will just say no English now the final question worth asking is given everything that you've said in this video what would you do differently what kind of Life advice would I give to
• 68:00 - 68:30 someone who is just starting out where I was 10 or 15 years ago that's a very difficult question to answer it's easy to give advice about what to do if you could go back into the world of 10 years ago but your life is not going to start 10 years in the past and the conditions of the world today are completely different if I was able to rewind the clock and go back to working at Amazon or Nvidia directly after graduation I could have been a millionaire by now $20,000 worth of Nidia stock options from 2014 would be worth about $5
• 68:30 - 69:00 million today but then again most of the money would have come from the appreciation of the company stock not from the salary of actually working there so the best strategy would have been to just get a student loan and spend all of it on Nvidia stock and then go sit on the beach for the 5 years that I spent in school and the 10 years that I spent trying to start a business however giving life advice that's based on the last 10 years of stock market performance is lazy and somewhat irresponsible I went to school with someone who got a full-time job at Uber
• 69:00 - 69:30 back around 2011 or 12 I remember having discussions with my peers about how this guy was going to become a millionaire when Uber ipoed however because of unfavorable market conditions Uber kept delaying their IPO over and over again and didn't actually end up iping until 2019 even though he did the full-time grind for years he ended up leaving well before the IPO date and I assume didn't benefit much from the stock options if you only focus on the salary that I would have made from Nvidia or Amazon
• 69:30 - 70:00 then I would probably have a partially paid off house or condo by now I also graduated into one of the best possible job markets for software Engineers but today the job market is a lot more competitive and housing is way more expensive the most significant economic factor of the last 15 years was the unprecedented period of near zero interest rates but as you may be aware interest rates are now higher and the Federal Reserve has repeatedly stated that interest rates will now be higher for longer if you're young you might
• 70:00 - 70:30 think that interest rates have little to do with the job market or the economy however the single best piece of advice that I can probably give you in this video is to make sure that you understand the relationship between the federal reserve's interest rate decisions and the overall economic cycle in hindsight I absolutely should have left Canada when I had the chance to 10 years ago but back then the future for Canada's Tech sector looked fairly bright which is one of the reasons why I stayed and so you're probably wondering would I give the same advice to leave
• 70:30 - 71:00 Canada today the predictable answer is just to say yes out of spite but if I'm going to give advice I should probably try to be more thoughtful it's possible that we've already been through the worst of Canada's Decline and things are about to turn a corner after all how much worse can things get right if I was to imagine a bright future for Canada it would probably come from a boom in the US economy that spills over into Canada since the US economy is 10 times the size of ours what happens in the US
• 71:00 - 71:30 economy can have a bigger impact on our daily lives than what happens in our own country this fact alone gives you a pretty good case for leaving Canada for the us either way life in Canada would be a lot better if our housing affordability situation would improve a bit but when you look at the cmhc's housing forecasts they seem to predict a fairly Bleak future until at least the 2030s from what I see in the news though now housing affordability is basically out of control in all Western countries right now it's tempting to think that
• 71:30 - 72:00 the grass is greener if you just move some results but if you do you might discover that you're actually just trading one Bleak future for a different one so it's important for you to do a lot of research before you move some results I'm not qualified to speak about what life is like in somewhere like the Bay Area or Texas but hopefully I've provided you with a fairly detailed look of my entrepreneurial experience here in Canada another conclusion that you might draw from this video is that I might have done better if I just gone into the trades instead of getting an expensive
• 72:00 - 72:30 and tedious academic degree like software engineering but again I think it's more complicated than that a couple of years ago I talked to some trades workers who were here in my apartment doing repairs under the previous owner I made some comments about how I might have done better in life if I had gone into the trades instead the worker said that in his industry it's nearly impossible to get trades work unless you do it through an intermediary company and that all of the apartment buildings and construction companies collude together to keep wages suppressed the
• 72:30 - 73:00 worker said that he can make around hundred Canadian dollars on a good day in the last year since this building was taken over by its new owner I've had many chances to chat with the trades workers who are doing the renovation work some of them have said that they're very unhappy with the working conditions but they have no choice others simply reply with no English even when I ask them a simple question like Hi how are you when it comes to giving advice on how to start a software consulting or contracting business the advice I'd give you would probably be to not start one
• 73:00 - 73:30 at all unless you already have a lot of deep industry or government connections from day one your experience might end up being similar to mine and there you have it the full story of why I'm in the situation that I'm in and an insight into the logical reasoning that got me here hopefully you can analyze the things that I've said and the decisions that I made so that you can avoid becoming a 37-year-old broke loser